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IE8 Breaking Microsoft's Web Standards Promise?
An anonymous reader points out a story in The Register by Opera Software CTO Hakon Lie which tells the story of how Microsoft's interoperability promise for IE8 seems to have been broken in less than six months. Quoting:
"In March, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would: use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default. Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community; people were stunned and delighted by Microsoft's promise. This week, the promise was broken."
Given MS' history this was almost a given.
What do you expect? They said that their operating systems were supposed to be extremely secure, and were they? No. Microsoft is not a software company driven by good morals, they are driven by money and their marketing department. So it was a publicity stunt. Microsoft has had many publicity stunts in the past and have broken many promises.
Anything and Everything about the Net
Considering your username, you are bound to lie for M$. M$ will pay people to do anything for them, including sending death threats to people who oppose Windoze or M$ in general.
that's because a good portion of slashdot are a bunch of faggots eating shit out of other faggots asses. fucking homos.
leg1timise doing fi8st organization
No, you're the idiot. Alpha means all features and defaults are not locked in. Beta means it is open for testing and supposed to be feature and configuration complete. Beta is for identifying bugs or other things that could be a problem. In this case, it is not a bug but "another thing" which needs to be identified and complained about... in this case, PROTESTED. You don't just file a bug report with Microsoft. It will be ignored. Microsoft has to be publicly protested in order to get them to do what is needed... even then there is no guarantee that they will.
Public opinion of Microsoft is a strange thing. When viruses and worms live in the holes and cracks of the Windows platform, people blame the writers of said malware exclusively and hold Microsoft blameless, or worse, paint them as the victim of being so successful. (Of course the writers, designers and more importantly the people who pay to have malware written and deployed are very responsible for its existence and the problems that result, no denying that.) Microsoft is the enabler in most of these situations and the public needs to be reminded of that fact until it is generally accepted and understood.
Adherence to standards is not "too good to be true" it's the way the vast majority of things actually work. M$ and IE are exceptions, not the rule, and they will go the way of all obstructive technology.
Browsers shouldn't really have contextual switching like this in the first place and should always only follow standards.
Since this is slashdot, I'll ignore any possible good things coming from this new browser. Microsoft is clearly a company that rapes babies and skins puppies (but only cute ones!). And now they release a beta of a browser than could possibly break (I didn't read the article in true /. form) some standards, a crime which is worse than either of aforementioned rape and killing. How could they!? Have they no soul!?
And my eyes have now rolled right into the back of my eye.
Thanks basement dwellers, you've been swell.
I live in a much bigger world that hasn't heard of the RIAA or MPAA before, the world where most people think "PC" means Windows, the world where Linux doesn't quite exist yet. Is your heard buried in the sand or buried in your world?
Microsoft knows the base-line of users it is dealing with. It spends millions knowing the user and user interfaces and the like. It is the same Microsoft that has STILL not taken out the "run on insert" autorun.inf nonsense from many machines. (Even Apple knew better than to do more than open up a window) It is the same Microsoft that thought it was a good idea to put ActiveX on the Wild-Wild-Web and expect everyone to place nice. The same Microsoft that makes a file executable by all users simply by having a ADE, ADP, BAS, BAT, CHM, CMD, COM, CPL, CRT, DLL, DO*, EXE, HLP, HTA, INF, INS, ISP, JS, JSE,
LNK, MDB, MDE, MSC, MSI, MSP, MST, OCX, PCD, PIF, POT, PPT, REG, SCR, SCT, SHB, SHS, SYS, URL, VB, VBE, VBS, WSC, WSF, WSH or XL* (probably not a complete list) extension on the file name. (And there is no defeat for EVERY execution privilege elevation exploit yet and from what I've heard thanks to their process messaging architecture, there is no way to fix them all without rewriting the Win32 API) The same Microsoft who thinks they can set up a stable server on an OS platform designed from the ground up for running user games and applications without consideration of security.
Yes, you could argue that the users need to be more aware of security issues than they are, but when you see the HUGE STEAMING PILE of complexities that a mere user is expected to know, understand and avoid, then I would have to insist that you're simply setting the bar a little too high for most users. Other computing environments have managed to avoid these problems using technically older technologies and methods.
I'm not going to say all other OSes are more secure or get into that nonsense, but I will say that Microsoft has a very bad track record and they haven't gotten off of their track despite all of its well known and identified problems. Microsoft could easily have done what Apple did -- rewrite a new OS and build a compatibility layer for old apps, but they didn't and every time they threaten to do that (as in the case of the next version of Windows after Vista) but they back off on it just as they back off on all other challenging improvements to the OS they have promised. In the end, they just repackage everything they made before and sell it to users once again.
Yes. Microsoft IS in fact the primary enabler. They could have fixed many of the problems I identified more than 10 years ago because they knew of those problems even back then.
That long list of file extensions comes from a list of recommended blocked extensions. You will find that when you rename a .EXE to the majority of these extensions, the executable runs just fine. Other extensions just need a little more help but can be just as effective. And the fact that filename extensions are always hidden by default obscures a lot from users they should be aware of.
"...just like ever other remotely user-friendly GUI shell does?" Not a Mac user...at least not a technical Mac user since every Mac user generally knows that the program to open a file with is included with the file description and not exclusively directed by file extension.
Apple did not try and fail writing a new OS from scratch. Okay, they didn't write it from scratch either, but they didn't fail. OS X is wildly successful. What annoys people most about OS X is that they can't not change it... and too often.
HAHAHAHA... no need to rewrite WindowsNT?! Yes there is. Another poster referred to Microsoft as MICROS~1 and I caught his meaning immediately. Microsoft builds their OSes upon the remains of their old OSes. There is still a lot of DOS in WindowsXP and Vista. I know there are claims to the contrary, but the leaked source code says otherwise. You know what happens when you build something on an unsuitable foundation? It crashes. The foundations of Windows are unsuitable for a security-sensitive world like the public internet.
"The fact remains that the vast, vast..."
Uh, yeah. Let's go back to that ridiculous level of complexity for keeping security concerns to a minimum to enable users to be reasonably secure without having to be or have an IT expert. Windows has been teetering between being an OS for the user and an OS for the server to the effect that it can be neither effectively. And I can now safely claim that I have personally run Linux servers on the wild-wild-internet without rebooting for a contiguous, uninterrupted calendar year without a reboot or power down. (I wasn't smart enough to have a dual power supply on the server when I was bringing the UPS down for an upgrade... so I had to bring the server down) That is what people should expect from a server OS. Windows is not stable enough to do that and it is designed in such a way that many or even most services that get updated require a reboot of the whole OS. (I can patch Apache or MySQL without bringing down the whole server... I've done it... many times) The point of that rambling was to show that a server class OS has a level of expectation to live up to that user OSes shouldn't need to consider. However, the same is true for a user-intended OS as well.
I won't deny that Windows has potential to live up to all of those expectations, but I can't say that it does or ever will. Every time I hear about Microsoft doing something exciting like ditching "backward compatibility" in favor of more efficient or more secure methods, I am listening closely and not because I want Microsoft to fail. I was one of the original Microsoft fanboys and would be again if they would just get their acts together and do what clearly and obviously needs to be done. I wouldn't dream of pushing Linux onto users and MacOSX doesn't have the applications support that serious business needs. It would be terrific if Microsoft would actually invest its money in product development instead of lawyers, marketing, keeping the competition down, lobbyists, bribery and a whole host of dirty tricks that have made them infamous over the past few years. All most of us ever hope for is a good, stable product.